Newbie developers are increasingly departing a crypto project while more “established” ones (more than two years) and those categorized as “emerging” (who have been working for one to two years) have remained relatively resilient over the past year.
A new study by Electric Capital shows that Ripple is one of the few projects that witnessed an increase in its developer counts as of October. The XRP ecosystem recorded more than 18% YoY growth and currently has 172 monthly active developers.
According to the report, projects such as Starknet and zkSync recorded increases of 4% and 6% YoY, respectively. While Starknet currently boasts 517 monthly active developers, the figure for zkSync stood at 229.
Additionally, Ethereum-based privacy-first zkRollup, Aztec Protocol saw over 168% YoY growth and now has 76 monthly active developers. Modular data availability network Celestia was trailing closely behind with more than 145% YoY growth, registering 81 monthly active developers.
TON, on the other hand, settled with a modest 8% YoY growth. Its monthly active developer count stood at 126.
As of October 1, 2023, there are 19,300 monthly active open-source developers. This marks a 27% decrease in developer numbers compared to October 1, 2022.
Notably, the departing developers in the crypto sector primarily consisted of newcomers who had been involved in crypto for less than a year and were responsible for approximately 25% of all code commits.
The report highlighted a significant drop of 58% in the number of Newcomers, a moderate increase of 11% in Emerging Developers, and a slight 5% uptick in the count of Established Developers.
Electric Capital software engineer Enrique Herreros further noted,
“Devs who stayed have been in crypto for longer and push code commits more days: Median 12 active weeks for devs still working vs 1 week for devs who left. Median 21 months experience for devs still working vs 5 months for devs who left.”
Moreover, it’s important to note that there has been a decline in the number of developers over the past year, with a 27% decrease from October 1, 2022, and a 4% decline from October 1, 2021.
Despite this recent drop, there remains a substantial increase of 66% in the developer count when compared to October 1, 2020, indicating the overall growth in the open-source developer community over the past three years.